Mormons to End Holocaust Victim Baptism

By GUSTAV NIEBUHR

Published: April 29, 1995

Ernest W. Michel, a survivor of the Holocaust, said that until last summer, he was unaware of a practice within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in which dead people are baptized as Mormons by living church members who stand in as their proxies.

That changed when Mr. Michel, chairman of the World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in 1981, discovered that his parents and several other family members, who had died in Nazi concentration camps, had been so baptized in ceremonies many years after their deaths. The discovery led to a formal complaint last November by the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, an organization of about 100,000 members of which Mr. Michel is a founder.

Yesterday, Mormon authorities said they would reissue a four-year-old order prohibiting church members from including Jewish Holocaust victims in baptismal ceremonies. In addition, the church agreed to seek out and remove the names of an estimated 380,000 Jewish Holocaust victims for whom such ceremonies have been performed from its International Genealogical Index, which lists 147 million names.

Posthumous baptism by proxy of Jewish Holocaust victims who are not ancestors of living church members is "counter to our doctrine," said Elder Monte J. Brough, a member of the church's Presidency of the Seventy, one of its top executive bodies. Elder Brough said that church authorities issued an order against it in March 1991, when they learned that it was occurring, but that some members continued the practice.

He said that these members, whom he did not identify, believed that they were performing a "true Christian act," but that church authorities told them it was insensitive to the victims' memory.

Although little known outside Mormon circles, "baptism for the dead," in which a church member stands in for a deceased person, is a main tenet of Mormonism. The church teaches that such ceremonies were performed in the early Christian church and work to help extend Mormon membership not just to the living, but also to the dead, who exist in what the church calls "the spirit world."

In Mormon theology, all people, living and dead, possess "free agency," and may either accept or reject church membership, even if they are baptized by proxy.

Ceremonies take place in the faith's 46 temples. A church member is immersed in a baptismal font as names of the deceased are read. The names of those to be baptized are taken from the church's genealogical archives, which contain approximately two billion names.

Elder Brough, who is executive director of the church's Family History Department, said church rules obligated members to perform genealogical research so they could baptize their ancestors, thus allowing the extended families to reunite in heaven.

But, he added, "we ask people to be respectful of other families" and try to get permission from non-Mormons before ceremonies are performed on behalf of their ancestors.

Mr. Michel, 71, who spent nearly six years in Nazi concentration camps as a young man, recalled reading an article last year in the Forward, a Jewish newspaper published in New York, about a woman who found that a family member who died in a Nazi camp in France was listed in the International Genealogical Index as having been baptized by proxy.

With the help of a Jewish genealogical group, Mr. Michel said he found that several of his relatives had also been baptized. "I was incensed that my parents who were killed in Auschwitz were now listed as members of the Mormon faith," he said.

After learning of other cases, he said, the American Gathering's executive council drafted a letter of protest last November to the church's then-President, Howard W. Hunter. A copy was sent to Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, a Mormon with whom Mr. Michel had earlier corresponded about a related matter.

Elder Brough said Mr. Hatch, a Republican, arranged a meeting on Jan. 6 with Mr. Michel, who was accompanied by Herbert Kronish, a New York lawyer and an official of the United Jewish Appeal. "It was the warmest, friendliest meeting that I could have imagined," said Mr. Michel, who is a former executive vice president of the United Jewish Appeal.

Representatives of the church and the Holocaust organization said they would sign a formal agreement on the baptismal issue on Wednesday at the New York offices of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

The agreement provides that copies of the list of all Holocaust victims to be removed from the Mormons' genealogical index will be given to the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, the United States Holocaust Memorial Commission, the New York Holocaust Memorial Commission, the Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles and the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem.

Elder Brough declined to say how much it would cost the church to remove the names of the Holocaust victims from the index, but he said the process would take about a year.